Applying geoscience to Australia's most important challenges

Making knowledge of Geoscience Australia's data and information assets accessible to the external community

Citation

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Abstract

The role of Geoscience Australia (GA) is to provide first class geoscientific information and knowledge which enables government
and community to make informed decisions about:
- the exploitation of resources
- the management of the environment
- the safety of critical infrastructure and
- the resultant wellbeing of all Australians.
GA has two internal catalogues which hold metadata of significant value to external researchers. The catalogues include national
collections of satellite images/datasets; geological and topographical maps of various scales; Maritime, Aboriginal Commission
and Postcode boundary datasets, plus other geoscientific thematic maps and collections. Staff from GA and ANDS worked together
to analyse the catalogues, map them to the ISO19115 metadata schema and provide a gap analysis to inform further development.
The original intention was to cross walk the 19115 profile to RIF-CS and install an OAI-PMH harvest point. ANDS, however,
was able to utilise funded work by AuScope by having an instance of GeoNetwork deployed in GA, which provides this capability
and can be leveraged to expose this data at the same time. This mapping also allows data of relevance to other disciplines
such as that relevant to marine research to be identified and appropriate feeds established.
The more significant achievement for GA was that it is now able to dynamically map from two existing independent internal
catalogues to a single standards compliant instance, without having to first create a single internal catalogue and then migrate
metadata from various catalogues into it. This approach will be used for other data types where GA has several internal databases
of the same data type.
This poster explores the issues that confronted the team, the solutions developed and the opportunities that have arisen.